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When I was at Islandora Camp trying to wrap my head around all things Islandora and Fedora, I was thinking ahead about a possible project in archives and research collections - migrating our collection/fonds descriptions and finding aids over to ICA AtoM.

ICA AtoM does some pretty cool stuff in terms of access to collection/fonds descriptions, integrates very nicely with Archivematica with accessioning born digital objects, and associating digital representations of item level objects with their respective collection/fonds. My greedy little brain wanted more! I wanted ICA AtoM to be able to pull in Fedora objects automatically and associate them with their respective collection/fonds. So, this is the hackfest proposal I submitted.

So what happened? What'd we end up doing?

The amazing Peter Van Garderen made absolutely sure Artefactual Systems staff was highly represented at hackfest, and I had two amazing people from Artefactual trying to parse my sleep-deprived-scatter-brained-state reasoning/logic behind what I wanted to do. David Juhasz and Jesús García Crespo, you rock!

We spent the first hour or so working through the Fedora REST API documentation looking for the best way to approach the "problem." After about an hour or so of working through a few conditional queries that would need to be strung together, Jesús jumped in and said, "Why aren't we using SWORD for this!?" Good question!

ICA AtoM can speak SWORD and Fedora and speak SWORD so long as you can get the module working. As things at hackfest generally go for me, it failed. I could not for the life of me get the module to build. Spend a some time going through build.xml and ant and I just weren't going to be friends that day.

Strike one - don't code conditional Fedora REST API queries - not sharable and scalable
Strike two - I couldn't get the SWORD module to build!
Strike three - ???

While brainstorming for other solutions to our "problem", David was looking for examples in which I could share records from our repository. Duh! OAI-PMH! ICA AtoM can harvest OAI. If we can map OAI sets to ICA AtoM collections/fonds, and set records to indivudual items in a collection/fonds we're set. Oh my, another use case of OAI-PMH! Yay!

Did we succeed? Not actually. Turns out the OAI-PMH harvesting code wasn't quite up to snuff at the time, and David, bless his heart, worked on trying to get it up to par before the end of the day. We were not able to pull together a working version, but the framework is there. It was there all along! (Ed, yes we could have and totally should have used atom :P )